Deep into the Labyrinths in the Novels by Louise Welsh

Book excerpt: Deep into the Labyrinths in the Novels by Louise Welsh is the first book to focus on the novels of Louise Welsh, one of the most acclaimed and interesting narrative voices in contemporary Scottish Literature. It explores the use of the image of the labyrinth as one of the sites for horror in classic Gothic literature and its rewriting into a contemporary gothic labyrinth in 21st century Scotland – and, by extension, in the European context – that co-exists with various other queer and intertextual labyrinths that complement and complicate it.This book analyses how Louise Welsh’s novels present different labyrinths that characters traverse and get lost in, and, by the same process, with which readers also become engaged. In both cases, characters and readers discover that the labyrinthine understanding of reality becomes more real than any other official version of reality. Each chapter of the book explores particular examples of these labyrinths, even though they are not linear: they tend to intermingle and intertwine.